


PUPPETIC JUSTICE

by Elendraug



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Doomed Timeline(s) (Homestuck), Epilogues-adjacent, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, M/M, Meteorstuck, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Sober Gamzee Makara, Sopor Slime, Withdrawal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:27:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22534732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elendraug/pseuds/Elendraug
Summary: KARKAT: I WISH I COULD SEE THE LOOK ON HIS FACE WHEN HE FINALLY REALIZES EVERYTHING HE BELIEVES IS A LIE.DAVE: be one sad clown that day
Relationships: Dave Strider/Equius Zahhak (referenced), Gamzee Makara/Dave Strider
Comments: 4
Kudos: 45





	PUPPETIC JUSTICE

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fox_Salz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fox_Salz/gifts).



> ♫ boards of canada - [dayvan cowboy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVsucS0rU3s)

“So the weird coffee pod isn’t winning anybody over today, huh?”

Dave slides into his own bed, behind Gamzee, who’s sought refuge within its unmade covers. With a recuperacoon it’s tough to make the call on whether a player’s lunar sway would sway their tendency to make the bed, but of all the Prospit dreamers, he made something out of his.

Gamzee shifts to accommodate his presence, struck with vertigo even while horizontal, and allows the neutral-woodsy notes of Dave’s new soap to replace the sense memory of anything approximating a baking pie. Rose’s home state is known enough for its apples to recognize them as official and emblematic, but it only took a few combinations of her keepsakes to alchemize scents evoking old-growth upstate forests, instead.

“We gotta get you washed up, dude, or this blanket’s gonna become its own unctuous film.” Dave’s hands are warm, exactly as warm as Karkat’s, but Karkat’s been busy since Vriska took Tavros’ life and Terezi took Vriska’s, and they both kept backsliding into old habits. “Have you eaten anything?”

“No.” He shakes his head, mussed bangs falling across his face, brushing over greasepaint that hasn’t yet worked its way into the fibers of Dave’s pillowcase. “Didn’t motherfuckin’ feel like it.”

Gamzee holds Dave’s hand where he’s draped it over his ribs, palpable within his t-shirt, space enough to ricochet revulsion when the ache of sopor’s absence returns in migraine waves that contextualize Sollux’s departure into the depths of the void. He knows he should, too, somehow, but the certainty of this impulse slips away whenever he tries to pinpoint the thought and hold it down, like shells washed back from the shore and tossed to the tumult of the tides.

“I bet Nepeta’d share some tea if you wanted,” Dave offers, his socked feet knocking against Gamzee’s bare ones, barely avoiding snagging the knit on his claws. “Catnip’s supposedly good for upset stomachs and insomnia.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” He lets out a long sigh, and if he could finally sink into sleep like into the sea, he isn’t certain if he’d ever want to resurface, regardless of warnings. “You don’t gotta try and solve all my fuckin’ troubles, bro.”

He can feel Dave relax against him, sternum to spine, his hold tight around his highblood torso. It’s unprecedented in Gamzee’s life for someone to be protecting him, attentive with broad grins and open eyes that have never known the perpetual penumbra of omnipresent shades, nor the disconcerting daily dread of watching where he steps. No voices or stars have been thrown, and Dave’s taken the death of his caretaker in stride, grieving alongside his friends for the loss at the hands of a wingless demon with one trophy too few by paradoxical accounting. Growing up is hard, and Dave understands.

“Nah, not tryin’ to take arms against them,” Dave clarifies, invoking another bard entirely. “Just tryin’ to shuffle you off a coil into some dreamless sleep. Or maybe onto some coils, if the mattress counts.”

The statement jostles loose something he doesn’t remember forgetting, lacunae scattered throughout his recollection and redacting details deemed important by someone, somewhere, somewhen. It’s struck through by his own hand, in blue he hasn’t spilled, not this here or this now. When he reaches for it, it’s intangible, and falls through like filling lost through punctured aluminum tins, a hole bored too widely to serve as a sieve, all of it descending towards bottomless nothing, into irrelevance.

Gamzee inhales as if there’s been a half-imagined weight on his chest, and unease sets into his shoulders where he swears he feels empty eyes on the nape of his neck. It’s targeted, green like Golgotha, like unearthed skeletons snaking offscreen in the hills, like a sprite suffused with remains stashed so safely they’ve been hidden from storytelling itself. Malice lingers in his limbic system, hollowing his reserves, threatening to tug him to narrative collapse, to flattened character assassination, to salacious slander, to every atomized fragment of his awareness strung out in an exploded sequence propped up for dissection and deconstruction, spaghettified, to punctuate his punishment at a single point.

Then it retreats, and he’s cloaked in the stability of ticking seconds, held securely by the hands of time, affixed and elevated again like notation within a measure, moving forward with musical purpose outside his own scope.

“Heard a human story lately,” Gamzee says, shakily, unnerved by his circuitous circumstances. “Just about the saddest thing I ever heard get said.”

Dave loops his fingers around Gamzee’s wrist, juggling reassurance and freedom of motion. “What was it?”

“Biscuit-warming tale you all wrote for wrigglers about a starving troll living under a bridge.” He tilts his skull, horns tipped towards the pillow, towards the headboard. “Three lusii almost pass him by but decide to fuckin’ kill him because they motherfucking can.”

Gamzee’s ribcage deflates as he exhales, and Dave presses a kiss to the back of his neck, just above the collar of his ratty t-shirt. A moment elapses in horrible, hurting silence before Dave leaps for levity. 

“Rude hunger be like that sometimes.”

He smiles, then, almost wide enough to begin to reach the smeared edges of makeup imitating the expression. “That it fuckin’ does.”

“Y’know, Equius says he misses you,” Dave adds, without missing a beat, like clockwork, sharing the sentiment like earbuds to enable Gamzee to hear what he’s hearing. “And specifically that he’s ‘willing to hold his horses’ as you might ‘expect’ him to, ‘cause he figures you gotta figure some shit out.”

It’s jarring, the juxtaposition of longing regret and looming doubt, rewinding his spotty mental records of their conversations when he was out of his thinkpan, agreeable, maybe oblivious. There’s too much to sift through when sleep has still evaded him, and while he wants to believe he was doing what he wanted, what he wants to believe has been used against him all too often. Gossamer is out of his grasp, or he’s out of its, snapped loose from a promise of unseen shackles set to silence him or send him walking blindly into a blade, a marionette for a would-be marquise, a dropped anchor within an appliance. 

“Real glad you’re both in each other’s serious business,” Gamzee offers, genuine if exhausted. “I’d much motherfuckin’ rather see you dropping beats than anybody else keep droppin’ like flies.”

“That’s a thing that won’t fly, is dudes droppin’ like flies.” There’s an opportunity to rhyme it with _pie in the sky_ or something similar, but Dave dismisses it before it ever becomes a true option. “Give it enough time to refine and you could see me in a suit and tie, makin’ him mine.”

“You were gonna do that anyway.” Gamzee brings his hand up to his chest, and Dave’s along with it, to obscure the twisting implication of a purple curlicue that’s emblazoned on his clothing in cracked screenprint. “The suit part, at least.”

“Yeah, true.” Even with the timeline off track, even with inevitability creeping in at the edges of their consciousness, there’s something steadying in the thought, something foundational in the shelter of void as a cornerstone of the cosmos. Even if this is all there is, for a while, they will have it. “But it gives us some good shit to look forward to.”

“Then that’s what we’ll motherfucking do.” Gamzee curls his chin down to his chest and raises their joined hands to brush a kiss over Dave’s knuckles. He brings his foot up, just enough to touch his metatarsals to Dave’s heel. “Me and you.”

Dave rests his forehead on Gamzee’s shoulder, cozy and close, wishing he could make and keep a promise to soothe his sleeplessness by snuggling, wishing it were that simple. He squeezes his hand. “I’d like that, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> VRISKA: Like I said. Got to admire the guy's determin8tion.   
>  VRISKA: Still, I can't imagine he's led a very enjoya8le existence.   
>  VRISKA: I mean, sure. May8e he THINKS he has. In the way that totally delusional, egomaniacal people tend to do.   
>  VRISKA: I 8et he never had anyone in his life who was actually important to him.   
>  VRISKA: Someone who could have helped him see that nothing is worth that kind of o8session.  
> VRISKA: That it's 8etter to just try and 8e happy.  
> MEENAH: poor skull guy 38(


End file.
